Bringing Big Ideas to Market

Nathan Sportel, ’10, helps to make his clients’ ideas reality — one patent at a time.

“Most of the time when you call a lawyer, something catastrophic has happened: someone died, someone got terribly injured, somebody didn’t pay you, you’re being sued, or whatever it may be. That’s not a call you really look forward to making,” said Nathan Sportel, ’10. But in his line of practice, there’s more to it. In fact, Sportel prides himself on being the lawyer his clients are excited to call in hopes of chasing a game-changing asset.

Sportel leveraged his background in electrical engineering into a career in intellectual property and patent law, where he has combined his abilities to assist inventors and entrepreneurs in bringing their big ideas to the market and protecting those big ideas from the competition.

One of the best things about my job is calling a client and telling them that they got their first patent application issued.

One of the best things about my job is calling a client and telling them that they got their first patent application issued.

As a law student, he found level ground with his engineering education, “I was sort of surprised by how similar the building blocks of engineering and law were — there are rules, you apply the rules to the facts, and you get an outcome, which is not all that different from applying numbers to the scientific formulas I had to memorize in engineering school.”

As a partner at Husch Blackwell, where he started as an associate in 2015, he drafts patent applications and works with patent examiners to get a patent application allowed. In addition to pursuing new patents for clients, Sportel also determines whether existing patents should have been issued in the first place or whether a party is infringing a patent through his concurrent litigation practice.

Sportel is passionate about being a part of the process that brings someone’s life work to fruition. “One of the best things about my job is calling a client and telling them that they got their first patent application issued,” he said. “Those are really amazing experiences because sometimes their business may be on the brink of crumbling — and now they’ve got this brand new source of revenue or something they can show to investors.”

One of his clients was recently issued two patents, and Sportel described the moment he presented them to the client: “He was so excited that he wanted to take selfies with me and the Husch Blackwell logo in our lobby. Those are fun moments.”